Danger of Substitution of Targets

Sometimes substitution of goals of some stakeholders with the goals of others occurs.

Such a situation usually arises when professional specialists involved in solving problems impose their vision of the world and thereby replace stakeholder’s main goals with their own. “The operation went brilliantly, but the patient died” is not a bad joke, but a statement that is common among surgeons. Consider another case when an elegant building was built on the campus of the University of Sussex (England), for which the architect was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Architects in 1965, but its internal layout was unsuitable for educational or administrative purposes. Many award-winning commercials and posters did not have any impact on the company’s business (recall the excellent advertising of the Imperial Bank in Russia of 1990s). A survey of the National Health Service in England found that less than 1% of the training time for doctors of this service was devoted to preventive medicine, although the organization was created for this very purpose. It should also be emphasized that the systems analyst, considering himself an experienced and knowledgeable professional, may begin to express his opinion instead of a stakeholder.

Another option of substitution of goals is the creation of “focus” groups of experts to determine the expectations of the target users. It is better to address the users themselves and involve them in the design of changes. For example, the leadership of a conservative party in the United Kingdom hired an environmental activist, an ardent opponent of the Tories, to lead a group to develop its environmental policy. The Labor Party is still using focus groups.

You can multiply such examples. One should be vigilant about this phenomenon during target-manifestation.

The Danger of Mixing Goals and Means

All the many goals that a subject proposed throughout his life include goals of different importance, long-term, scale, reachability, etc. The goals of the subject are not chaotic or independent. They are connected, coordinated, ordered, and forming a tree-like structure (Figure 5.8).

The peculiarity of this tree is that each of its elements has a dual meaning: it is a means for the upper-level element associated with it and a goal for the lower-level elements. Therefore, when a stakeholder is faced with the question of what his goal is in a given situation, he must decide which floor of the tree he is on. This is where the possibility of error is laid — choose a tool instead of a target, making a mistake on the floor.

For example, consider a case when city authorities appealed to the systems consulting firm to determine where it is best to build a new hospital. It was possible, after coordinating the criteria with the customer, to compare the selected sites with their help and to solve the optimization problem by satisfying the client. However, systems analysis recommends verifying goals for truth. The question: “Why do you need a new hospital”? is answered by “To improve the medical care of the population” (this was the true goal). Other means of achieving the goal were considered, and it turned out that for the same subsidies, it was much more effective to coordinate and modernize the network of already existing medical institutions instead of building a hospital.

FIGURE 5.8 Goals of a subject are coordinated in a tree-like structures.

The technique which makes it possible to detect confusing the goals with means consists of asking the question: “Why do you need it”? If the answer mentions other goals, it is necessary to determine whether they belong to a higher or lower level compared to the declared one.

The Danger of Incomplete Enumeration of Goals

In many cases, the desired future is complex and its description consists of not one, but several goals. A very dangerous case is when the subject does not enumerate all of them due to either forgetfulness or finding some of them unimportant. Even if the goals mentioned are true, implementing an incomplete set of a multiple goal gives an absolutely unacceptable result.

For example, in one of the areas it was instructed to develop a proposal to improve the economic efficiency of the woodworking industry. In particular, it was proposed to merge small enterprises into one large association with obvious technological and economic benefits. Local authorities, however, blocked this project despite the fact that it fully met the specified criteria. It turned out that with the formation of a large association, the woodworking enterprises will be transferred from the system of local industry to the subordination of the union ministry. Although revenues will indeed increase, contributions to the local budget will decrease, as will the percentage of materials and products produced and distributed in the region. Thus, the incompleteness of the target display crossed out a lot of work to create the project.

In engineering folklore, there is a whole series of jokes under the general title “Correctly formulate a technical task”.

These are fictional funny stories that illustrate how absurd the result is if you precisely follow an incomplete set of specified requirements.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to give recommendations on how to achieve the completeness of the composition of a multiple goal besides persistent repeated reference to the respondent. However, there is one possibility to detect the incompleteness of the declared goals: if the goals are not described in all languages of the configurator, it is a clear sign that not all the goals are declared.

The Danger of Not Being Able to Express a Goal

Despite all the efforts to “draw out” his true goal from the stakeholder, sometimes we still have doubts that we have achieved the desired result. More often there are cases when the subject finds it difficult to express his desires or does not know what he wants. But the need to reveal his true purpose remains.

There are two possibilities to circumvent this difficulty.

The first is to create an environment in which the subject will not have to speak but to act purposefully, so his goal will manifest itself experimentally.

The explicit purposeful action of a person is an act of choice. If there are several opportunities in front of him, from which he needs to choose only one, he chooses the one that best suits his goal, even if it is not completely conscious.

Therefore, you can try to create a situation of choice. A catchy call is placed above the entrance to one American supermarket: “If you don’t know what do you need, come to us, we have it!” After wandering through the floors of this huge store selling everything from fruits and toys to electronics and weapons, you will definitely see what you want to buy. So, our stakeholder needs to present a menu of intended, possible, and suitable goals that correspond to the situation in question.

However, in applied system analysis, another special variant of the situation of choice has been developed, when the subject expresses their wishes, they are not in the form of a statement of purpose, but in the form of a description of the final result. R. Akoff [4] called this method idealized redesign.

The next task is offered to the stakeholder. You don’t like the existing system. Imagine that you can do everything without any limits! Abolish an existing system and design something that will satisfy you from scratch. Do not think about w'hether this can be done, if there are enough resources, etc. without any restrictions!

Stakeholders start work with curiosity. First, they break away from their narrow' point of view' and try to look at the situation as a whole for the first time which is interesting. Second, in the work, there is an element of the game “in the Lord God”, — “I can do everything!”. It is always interesting to play. But the most interesting thing is what comes next. When an idealized project design is checked for feasibility with available limited capabilities, it turns out that this w'ill not be possible at 100%, but a fairly close approximation of it is possible.

An example is the approximation of the ideal and mass-unattainable goal of individual training for each student, that is, the creation of subgroups with more homogeneous compositions and different programs for them. (But be aware of the impossibility of changing a single element in a system: it requires to change many surrounding elements. In this example, you have to change the entire infrastructure of education.)

The second possibility of determining the true goal of the subject is to formulate it instead of him, as if to “calculate” the goal. This feature is based on the already noted tree structure of subjective goals. The subject cannot name the goal w'e are looking for, but it is on one of the branches of the tree. If you determine w'hich branch, then it will be possible to find it, going down this branch. This task is facilitated by the fact that root goals and high-level goals, called life values, are fully realized by the subject, and he does not hide them, but on the contrary, he is proud of them. So, it is not difficult to find out the life values of a stakeholder. Publicists and scientists often pay attention to a certain opposition of such life values as “technocratic thinking” and “humanistic thinking” as different approaches to the formation of goals. Their main difference can be figuratively expressed by the slogans: “Man is the king of nature” and “Man is a part of nature”. A more detailed opposition can be represented as Table 5.1.

These lists do not claim to be complete, as they only illustrate the difference between the two styles of thinking. Although such a comparison is made to emphasize (quite rightly) the dangers of a purely technocratic approach to the choice of goals, a complete rejection of all technocratic values would be excessive. For example, scientific and technological progress is not an alternative to social development, but its means; education can be considered as the antipode of culture only in isolation from it.

How' different goals dictate these different value systems can be illustrated by a story of an American city. The municipality had to instruct the traffic police w'hat measures to take to reduce the number of traffic accidents. There are two ways:

TABLE 5.1

Technocratic and Humanistic Values Systems

hidden and open patrols. In the first, a police officer detects violators from an ambush and fines them; in the second, he openly demonstrates his presence on the road, and, seeing him, drivers follow the rules. The votes in the municipal council are divided. Some justified their decision with a desire to replenish the city budget with fines and restore order. Others pointed to the unethical, provocative ambushes, the obvious presence of a policeman that prompted caution to drivers.

The difficulty of the method of “calculating” a goal through the life value is that it is not one in a person (e.g., human interests put in the first place, others are the interests of the nation, third are of their company, fourth are families, fifth are personal, spiritual values, material, political, aesthetic, etc.). In different situations, a person can rely on different values. Which of them to try to find out in our case?

If this cannot be determined from the nature of the problem itself, then the answer lies in the configurator. After all, life values are expressed in some languages. Therefore, it is necessary to deal only with those values that are described in the languages of the configurator of the given stakeholder.

Peculiarities of Identifying the Goals of the Organization

The reasons for the discrepancy between the declared and true goals were discussed above when the subject (“physical person”) unintentionally — by mistake or ignorance — declares a nontrue goal or not all true goals. The case of identifying the goals of the organization has to be allocated separately.

The fact is that the spokesman of the organization’s goals is its leadership. And it has to announce the goals of the organization if there are conflicts between the interests of his system and the environment, as well as the interests of its system and its own interests. As a result, the goals proclaimed by the corporation do not always coincide with the true goals: there is often a big difference between what is being preached and what is being done in practice (which the system analyst should reveal).

In the first direction (management behavior in the event of a conflict of interests between an organization and society), R. Ackoff [4] gives such examples: “Many organizations proclaim care for the quality of the environment, but protect and support it no more than they are forced by the laws and public opinion”. (Suffice to mention the behavior of oil companies in the virgin territories of the Russian North.) “Some companies that promote unlimited competition and a free market system turn to the government as soon as they feel that it infringes their interests. Others claim equal employment opportunities and carefully avoid employing members of national minorities and women”.

The second direction is connected with the fact that the leadership of the organization inevitably has its own goals, which are sometimes realized at the expense of the resources of the organization. In such cases, the leaders simply remain silent about their goals, although in fact they are trying to realize them fully. As R. Ackoff writes, “many company executives claim that their main goal is profit maximization. However, an impartial check of their behavior reveals that this goal is not their dominant one. Otherwise, the directors would work in less luxurious cabinets, fly on scheduled flights, stay in medium-sized hotels, etc.”

It is clear that most managers tend to donate at least part of the profits in the name of ensuring an acceptable quality of business life. Again, the point is not that such a goal is wrong or immoral; on the contrary, it should be extended to all workers. The desire of management to ensure a high quality of life is not a secret for many people who do not benefit from this desire, and they are indignant about this. Their simplified morality inhibits the development of corporations. Sometimes managers experience guilt in such cases. The stronger this feeling, the deeper they go into defense; therefore, the more they resist change. It also hinders development”.

According to R. Ackoff, it is useful to divide goals at different levels of the tree into tasks, goals, and ideals. With the technology “top-down” first of all try to formulate the goal of the highest level — the mission of the organization. The mission is a common goal for all members of the organization, defining and uniting all the roles of the system in the environment and harmonizing the actions within the entire system. The difficulty in defining a mission is that the leadership of an organization is inclined to consider the mission of the goal of the system itself (“to become more profitable, to become larger (grow), to become better in the industry”, etc.). A well- defined mission should reflect the interests of all stakeholders.

Gradation of goals can be defined in different ways. As an initial classification, R. Ackoff proposes to distinguish between:

• 1. tasks — results that are supposed to be obtained within the planned period;
• 2. goals — results that are not expected to be achieved beyond the planned period, but to which we expect to come closer within this period;
• 3. ideals — results that are considered unattainable, but approximation to which is desirable and possible.

Thus, tasks can be considered as means of achieving goals, and goals as means of approaching ideals.

In the case of solving the problem of an organization, it is necessary to determine not what the organization does not want (this is expressed in the problematic mess), but what the organization wants: its ideals, goals, objectives, and “target mess”.

A very effective method for this is the idealized redesign of the organization, a method developed by R. Ackoff’s school. It consists in not dealing with the elimination of the deficiencies of the existing system, but immediately beginning to design the desired system.

To this end, it is proposed to proceed from the assumption that the existing system “disappeared last night”, leaving only its environment. Further, it is planned to build a project of such a system that the stakeholders would like to have right now if they could create such a system. There are only three restrictions on the project:

• 1. the project should be technologically feasible: not any science fiction (e.g., one should not assume that the communication in the system will be telepathic, but it is possible to plan the use of satellite or fiberoptic channels);
• 2. the project does not have to be feasible, but must be compatible with the environment (inherently), that is, do not contradict existing laws and regulations;
• 3. the projected organization must be capable of continuous improvement, that is, learning and adapting to changes in internal and external circumstances.

Techniques of Work with Goals

Let us discuss several technical aspects of the execution of the target detection stage.

When formulating goals, it is recommended to strive for clear, understandable definitions. Of course, it is not always possible to achieve measurable concreteness (e.g., in the case of the goal “To increase the morale of a sports team”), but we should strive to do this in every way (“By the end of the year, to reach such a production volume of such a product”). Experts recommend to try to achieve goals that are:

a. realistic, that is, achievable with cash financial, material, and time resources;

b. specific, so that any progress toward the goal contributes to the solution of this particular problem, and not another problem;

c. measurable, that is, would allow to track the process of movement to the goal by measuring, the costs of which are within acceptable limits.

Sometimes goals can be formulated as a positive mirror image of a negative problem formulation. However, more often, one problem gives rise to several goals, especially if we strive for their specificity.

The next question is about structuring the target mess. Sometimes (especially when there are no constraints in the means) you can work with the target mess without arranging it. But it is often necessary to establish the priority, the order of work with different goals. A convenient means for this is establishing causal relationships between goals, which is expressed in their alignment in the form of a tree-like structure, the “tree of goals”. If such relations really exist, the goal of the upper level cannot be achieved until the lower goals are realized, and the question of work organization is solved automatically.

There are two most common ways to build a tree of goals. If the source material is a target mess, then it can be built into a tree according to the method described in the section on problematic mess (the problem tree was built there).

In the cases when the final goal is of a project nature, that is, you can first formulate a “global goal” (this also requires serious efforts), then the goals of the lower levels can be obtained algorithmically using the decomposition algorithm described in the book by F.I. Peregudov and F.P. Tarasenko [5]. Often, goal trees are built on the basis of intuition and commonsense, but this is fraught with reduced quality results.

These two methods of constructing a tree of goals are sometimes called “bottom- up” and “top-down” technologies, respectively.

We also note the possibility of a situation where the links between the identified goals are not lined up in a tree but instead in a network structure. This should not confuse us since it will not become an obstacle for the subsequent identification of discrepancies between the problem and target messes.

Questions and Tasks

• 1. Why is it necessary to identify the goals of stakeholders to design an improving intervention?
• 2. List the main reasons for the discrepancy between the declared and true goals.
• 3. What is a “goal tree” and how can it be built?